Customer Reviews

The Technological Society

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Before proceeding with this review, let me just say that no fewer than a hundred pages could be trimmed from its content without diluting its message at all. Many of the examples used in the book are extremely dated; while I think I'm fairly well read, I confess that I'm not really up on the vicissitudes and catfights of French academic sociology in the early 1960's (to give but one example). With that being said, this book is worth well worth the time spent reading its 436 pages.

This is undoubtedly one of the most important books of the twentieth century, and if you accept its thesis you won't be able to look at the political milieu in the same way ever again. (If you agree with it and it doesn't change the way you look at things, you haven't grasped its importance.) Most political theorists take ideology to be a central point from which "real world" consequences emanate. In other words, a Communist or libertarian ideology in practical use will produce a particular type society and individual divorced from the actual technical workings of the society. Liberals and conservatives both speak of things in such a manner as if ideology is the prima facie cause of existence - but as Ellul shows in painstaking detail, this is wrong. What almost everyone fails to grasp is the pernicious effect of technique (and its offspring, technology) on modern man.

Technique can loosely be defined as the entire mass of organization and technology that has maximum efficiency as its goal. Ellul shows that technique possesses an impetus all its own and exerts similar effects on human society no matter what the official ideology of the society in question is. Technique, with its never-ending quest for maximum efficiency, tends to slowly drown out human concerns as it progresses towards its ultimate goal. "...the further economic technique develops, the more it makes real the abstract concept of economic man." (p. 219) Technique does not confine itself merely to the realm of technical production, but infiltrates every aspect of human existence, and has no time for "inefficiencies" caused by loyalties to family, religion, race, or culture; a society of dumbed-down consumers is absolutely essential to the technological society, which must contain predictable "demographics" in order to ensure the necessary financial returns. "The only thing that matters technically is yield, production. This is the law of technique; this yield can only be obtained by the total mobilization of human beings, body and soul, and this implies the exploitation of all human psychic forces." (p. 324).

Ellul thoroughly shows that much of the difference in ideology between libertarians and socialists becomes largely irrelevant in the technological society (this is not to say that ideology is unimportant, but rather that technique proceeds with the same goals and effects.) This will doubtlessly please no one; liberals want to believe that they can have privacy and freedom despite a high degree of central planning, and libertarians want to believe that a society free of most regulation and control is possible in an advanced technological society. Libertarian fantasies seem especially irrelevant given the exigencies of a technological society; as Ellul notes, as technique progresses it simply cannot function without a high degree of complexity and regulation. "The modern state could no more be a state without techniques than a businessman could be a businessman without the telephone or the automobile... not only does it need techniques, but techniques need it. It is not a matter of chance, nor a matter of conscious will; rather, it is an urgency..." (p. 253-254). Can anyone really doubt Ellul here, especially seeing as how twenty-plus years of conservative promises to downsize government still result in more regulation and bureaucracy with every passing year? Planning, socialism, regulation, and control are the natural consequences of technique; an increasingly incestuous relationship between industry and the State is inevitable. "The state and technique - increasingly interrelated - are becoming the most important forces in the modern world; they buttress and reinforce each other in their aim to produce an apparently indestructible, total civilization." (p. 318).

This is not an optimistic book. Given that the nature of technique is one of a universal leveling of human cultures, needs, and desires (replacing real needs with false ones and the neighborhood restaurant with McDonalds), Ellul is certainly pessimistic. He does not propose any remedies for the Skinnerist nightmares of technique somehow leading to a Golden Age of humanity, where people will enjoy maximal freedom coupled with minimal want: "...we are struck by the incredible naivete of these scientists... they claim they will be in a position to develop certain collective desires, to constitute certain homogeneous social units out of aggregates of individuals, to forbid men to raise their children, and even to persuade them to renounce having any... at the same time, they speak of assuring the triumph of freedom and of the necessity of avoiding dictatorship... they seem incapable of grasping the contradiction involved, or of understanding that what they are proposing." (p. 434).

In this famous volume, Jacques Ellul explores the role of technique in the modern world. In Ellul's view, ordered efficiency is the first and foremost law of the technical world, with widespread implications for human life. Modern man lives under a framework of artificial operational objectives he wasn't designed to cope with. Technique has turned men into mere resources thrown around wherever the technical system finds them most useful.

The technical system is no longer within the reach of human control: it has taken on a life of its own and constitutes an independent force consuming more and more of the non-technical world around it. Men do not use technique: technique uses men. The argument behind this is not as metaphysical as it may appear; in much Ellul is as materialistic as Marx and seeks to penetrate the social reality's "essence" just as Marx did in Capital.

The sociology and philosophy of this work is original, radical and logical. Whether you agree or disagree with Ellul, you are bound to be influenced and impressed by the intellectual effort put into this book.

I first read this book in college in 1971. It has had more lasting impact upon my view of the world than any other book I read at that time. I go back to it every now and again. Anyone interested in the effects of globalization and the drive to faster and faster technological change and the maximizing of shareholder value should read this book. We are driven to compartmentalize our relationships to become efficient, the ultimate law of technology. Our relationships with our families, our neighbors, our communities, our friends and our government are impacted by the drive for efficiency.

This book put me in mind of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and The Last Man. Both document the ascendance of the person who is a rational and insecure seeker of comfort, afraid of passion and psychologically tiny: the individual with a small "i". Ellul is pessimistic. Our plight is due to our complete immersion in technique, the end of which is "the one best way" and efficiency. Against this there is no appeal and human spirituality and individualism are left behind as the "mass man" is created. This is the person who seeks only pleasure and entertainment and doesn't see his/her loss of uniqueness, beguiled by the products of technology and the promise of material progress. Technology is the answer to all things and the destroyer of all that is not technique. This is not due to a malign intent but simply the result of technique itself. There is no escape from technique, it permeates our world. An excellent example is the writer who, though wanting to express a different perspective is forced through the sieve of the techniques of the publishing business in order for the composition to see the light of day. Ellul makes a strong and frightening case. The one major oversight, for which we cannot blame one who wrote in 1964, is the power of the Internet for individual expression. He would, however, likely maintain that although this is an outlet for expression, the individual's voice is still lost in a cacaphony of other voices, as a result of the techniques of computer communication. Not an easy read, this book is an intellectual delight. Ellul's ideas are even more powerful today for the fact that they have not been contradicted but reinforced in the 35 years since he wrote.

This book reads like it was written in 1998 but it was written in 1964! Basically all the current ills that humanity must endure with his technology are all elucidated decades before other supposedly astute "intellectuals" knew what was even going on! He uses the example of man using "technique" to show how we use technique in everything we do from education to politics and how over time technology shall overwhelm any attempts to control it and how a totalitarian state is all but inevitable. Extremely well written and researched. It really should be cited by more authors and read more widely. I would definitely recomend this book to anyone who wishes to learn more about the technological society in which they live.

It has been said by some Ellul has proven mistaken because of the decentralization brought by modern technology. This is based on a very common misunderstanding.

When you couple Ellul's "one best way" with the words of another author, the situation becomes clear.

"When the inhabitant of a democratic country compares himself individually with all those about him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of any one of them; but when he comes to survey the totality of his fellows and to place himself in contrast with so huge a body, he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness. The same equality that renders him independent of each of his fellow citizens, taken severally, exposes him alone and unprotected to the influence of the greater number. The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to it's beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence." Alexis De Tocqueville

The common perception of decentralization is in fact the application of the "one best way" by a multitude of special interests. There is nothing whatever to the idea that decentralization debunks Ellul's work. Each of the individuals spoken of by Tocqueville applies the "one best way" to his or her own pursuit. The decentralization is in the ends, not the means.

The charge Ellul's assertions are unsupported misses the fact the assertions need no support other than an eye to see what is going on in the world all around us.

This book is one any educated person should be ashamed not to have read.

If a book can be rated for just making you think than this is one.

Actually, the late-Jacques Ellul had been involved in the Reformed Church in France and was Professor of Law and Sociology and History of Institutions at the University of Bordeaux.

His Reformed theology wrestling with Marxist influence helped build his observations that have been appreciated by both social conservatives and liberals. He drew from the only viable Marxist critique - that industrialisation, in essence dehumanizes people (separates them from what they make). Just look at how impersonal Western society has become (this is just one aspect). Ellul goes further and describes the fetish for technique (e.g. learn something, do it, have power). A good current example of this is contemporary education (the road to power is knowledge, hence the Technique of the classroom). The danger lies in the Falleness of man with knowledge of Technique without proper morals and valuing.

However, Ellul often fell into the French deconstructive mindset, which always makes it difficult to build upon a proper weltenschaaung (worldview).

Ellul was a very humane man, who sought to be informative.

Ellul, like a true philosopher, begins at the beginning to analyze the place of technology in modern human life. Rather than endorsing or assaulting technology (although it often seems more like the latter), his purpose is to bring his reader to awaken to how technology determines our lives. I took a class in Philosophy of Technology with this and William Barrett's _Death of the Soul: from Descartes to the Compuer_, (also highly reccomended), and it radically recreated my worldview.

This book is a highly significant and most important treatise on the cold, hard demonic presence that constitutes the role of technique in our world, and how it birthed "The Technological Society."
I would refrain from using such an easily miscontrued and loaded term as "demonic presence" to attempt to encapsulate what Ellul delineates in this book with consumate skill and near faultless powers of reason; but I think it pretty much fits the bill.
I would recommend Ellul's "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" to accompany this book as they dovetail superbly. Perhaps The Technological Society first as it paves the way for Propaganda; one can't exist without the other. And Robert Merton's translation of the former seemed to be more fluid and easier to digest then Kellen & Learner's version of Propaganda. It also introduces key concepts towards an understanding of Ellul's complex analysis of how men's attitudes are "formed."

The Technological Society is a book of immense insight, clarity of thought and mesmerising, profound passages on reality as it is shaped by technique. He presents a world inhabited by the "mass man," in a massified societal complex, which of necessity dictates techniques devoid of humanity to manage it effectively. Technique constitutes a kind of perfect intelligence, whose only point of reference is itself and whose focus is on the efficient integration of the soft, warm, and weak creatures that are mankind. Too wilful, chaotic and numerous are we that techniques of management; organization; regulation; health; information; etc, are inevitable to achieve a universal "best practice" for our own benefit. Or really for the interests of that thing known as society. This phenomenon even births techniques to soothe and placate the soul of man lacerated by the cold, efficient scalpel of the technical apparatus.

It is both the poison and the antidote.

These two quotes from the book will suggest something of Ellul's thought here:

Definition of technique-

"In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given state of development) in every field of human activity."


Machine and Technique-

"All-embracing technique is in fact the consciousness of the mechanized world.
Technique integrates everything. It avoids shock and sensational events. Man is not adapted to a world of steel , technique adapts him to it. It changes the arrangement of this blind world so that man can be a part of it without colliding with its rough edges, without the anguish of being delivered up to the inhuman. Technique thus provides a model, it specifies attitudes that are valid once and for all. The anixiety aroused in man is soothed by the consoling hum of a unified society."


The Characterology of Technique-

"Technique worships nothing, respects nothing. It has a single role: to strip off externals, to bring everything to light, and by rational use to transform everything into means. More than science, which limits itself to to explaining the 'how,' technique desacrilizes because it demonstrates (by evidence and not by reason, through use and not through books) that mystery does not exist. Science brings to the light of day everything that man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of everything and enslaves it. The sacred cannot resist. Science penetrates to the great depths of the sea to photograph the unknown fish of the deep. Technique captures them, hauls them up to see if they are edible - but before they arrive on deck they burst. And why should technique not act thus? It is autonomous and recognises as barriers only the temporary limits of its action. In its eyes, this terrain, which is for the moment unknown but not mysterious, must be attacked. Far from being restrained by any scruples of anything sacred, technique constantly assails it. Everything which is not yet technique becomes so. It is driven onward by itself, by its character of self-augmentation. Technique denies mystery a priori. The mysterious is merely that which has not yet been technicized."

As has been noted by many, and addressed by Ellul in the forward to the book, his views seem essentially fatalistic, pessimistic, with no potential for escape from the virtual prison he presents here.
I view it far more as an essentially honest and unflinching record of his gaze at the world we live in, perhaps even more relevent now than when it was first published in 1954.
And it is also a challenge: what can we do to counter this presentation of a world encircled by an almost otherworldy phenomena that cares not for humankind?

What is technique? Why has it birthed a world of machines, of technology?
I believe that this book has a huge piece of the puzzle to answer those questions. Technique may seem a boon to our current state of civilization, a saviour of humanity even; this book may reveal that it has a secret undiagnosed pathology that results in it being mightily inimical to man.

This is about "mass market paperback" edition. Probably very interesting book. Unfortunately, I am not able to read it. Production quality is extremely poor. Format is small, about a postcard size, font is 8pt. Pring is blurred, dark gray, on light qray, extremely poor quality paper. Font intensity and blurness is different on almost each page. Even with magifying glass reasing reading is hard.

Returning to Amazon and will invest more monies to purchase "not mass market" edition